Peer/Friend and thoughts about The Memory of Earth

A warm day. Nice and blue with little, if any, wind. It was pretty awful. You felt dull and drained from a night of drinking with friends. Acquaintances, really. You’d call them friends in normal conversation but not to yourself. They were acquaintances because 1. at bottom you didn’t feel as if you could relate to them and 2. you didn’t sense as though it would be helpful to speak seriously with then to move things toward self-disclosure. They were peers, of course, but again only in normal conversation. To yourself a peer and a friend were nearly the same thing. The terms both implied similarities in lifestyle. For instance, a peer is someone who you can relate to because they share with you a role, a niche, in a society. A peer is someone who is at the same level of development as you and who is likewise endeavoring to move in the same subtle direction. In short to be a peer is to encounter similar problems and confusions. To contrast this, a friend is someone whose disclosure of the path is possible and who finds sharing enjoyable. So a friend is a little more than a peer and a peer is a little more than someone of similar date of birth.

You forget about flourishing sometimes.

Maybe it is lost in a sense of injustice: the conditions seem all wrong, they don’t let you grow, no one around here is of any value, has ever said anything worthy of the effort of speech. This rebellious Margo Roth Spegelman thing.

The curative imaginings: go off and ‘get it’; move in with her and intimately share.

The movement of the tao.

You occasionally grasp this insight that you have had in the past. The insight is: there is only the circumstance, and everything flows from it. From this perspective its perhaps impossible to get angry with oneself and other people because there is no other possibility of movement. Yet it is confusing.

Getting up early may be helpful. The social guilt or shame will not be a variable.

“I felt like is was something being done to me instead of something we were doing together.” (The Memory of Earth by Orson Scott Card, pg 20-21)

Thoughts on The Memory of Earth:

• The conflicts of movements of transitional-adults, the unease of relationships of those beyond who feel themselves being usurped in someway.
• The curative imaginings: go off and ‘get it’; move in with her and intimately share, quiet down, be well, figure out.
• It is necessary to move beyond instinct in order to develop. In fact nature is urging one not to.